High-concept silliness from Cruise; class condescension from Salma Hayek in Beatriz at Dinner
Tom Cruise is a product of the ’80s, the period when American movies gave up that mesmerizing 1970s spirit of self-examination and became fatally “high-concept.” Cruise’s recent string of action movies showcasing his bantam intrepidness have all been frenetically “high-concept,” including his new remake of The Mummy.
Unlike classically introspective 1970s movies such as The Godfather, The Long Goodbye, Hard Times, Sisters, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers — films of various genres whose narrative revisions (and emotional depth) were based in the era’s social restlessness — Cruise’s The Mummy merely updates the horror genre to fit a meaningless, diversionary paradigm. (A new franchise based on Universal Studios’ classic horror films is now called Dark Universe.)
The Mummy does little more than reflect dark, Millennial political unease. Its Iraq War setting — in which characters playing American soldiers mimic the Taliban in violating the sanctity of anthropological treasures — evokes post-9/11 distress simply as a platform for violence: knockabout fight scenes and chase sequences.
Cruise plays Iraq War soldier Nick Morton, an imperfect yet egotistical guy to whom comic-book fans might relate because he never takes himself seriously but, when forced to fight against evil, demonstrates invincible supernatural powers. There’s slim difference between profiteer Morton (“We’re not looters, we’re liberators”) and the nefarious actions of an underground government bureaucracy headed by a duplicitous official (Russell Crowe as Dr. Jeckyll/Mr. Hyde). This jumble of genre clichés, impersonally directed by Alex Kurtzman, trifles with post-9/11 political reality — and trashes our ethical responses to it.
As one more product made in the current mode of high-concept comic-book franchises, The Mummy follows the Marvel Comics formula though relentless, jokey action scenes that carry a spooky, anti-Christian resonance. Evil doesn’t oppose Good in The Mummy, but it challenges global policy. So the self-centered Morton lacks all introspection. The Taliban’s machine-gunning of ancient sculptures in Mesopotamia (identified as the “cradle of civilization”) is as self-centered as Morton’s theft of the sacred scarab that frees the long-buried, malevolent Egyptian princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella) to unleash her vengeance upon the modern world.
Don’t excuse this film as “entertainment” when it shows the guilty, avaricious West as deserving its heinous fate, the wrath of ancient civilizations. Take at least one scene seriously: Morton and his Anglo love interest (Annabelle Wallis as a government anthropologist) are seen outrunning F/X clouds of mayhem — the Middle East’s revenge that engulfs London when Ahmanet calls forth the “the sands of Egypt.” It callously repeats the pandemonium of 9/11 as action-movie fun.
At least Breck Eisner’s underrated Sahara (2005), in which Matthew McConaughey played an American explorer faced with reevaluating our Civil War ethics during a time-travelling adventure in West Africa, was neither fatuous nor politically irresponsible. But the silly Mummy showcases guilt only when Westerners defend themselves against the unfathomable and the exotic. “It takes a monster to fight a monster,” the movie’s epilogue goes. But that line is not a political warning; The Mummy merely indulges cultural guilt — and masochism.
After making the best films of his adult career (Minority Report, War of the Worlds, Lions for Lambs), Cruise, a child of ’80s Hollywood, settles for commercially based, high-concept, political exploitation.
*****
‘Hell hath no fury,” Cruise’s soldier tells an Army officer, explaining female wrath in The Mummy. His joke coincidentally touches on Hillary Clinton’s vengeance tour, now taking pop culture by storm. That wrath also occurs in the egregious Beatriz at Dinner, a bleeding-hearts’ melodrama by director Miguel Arteta and screenwriter Mike White. In this cautionary fable, Mexican immigrant Beatriz (played without make-up by multimillionairess Salma Hayek) confronts wealthy, patronizing white attendees at a swanky business dinner on a Los Angeles estate.
Beatriz works as a spiritually sensitive masseuse. She also raises goats against city ordinances in her L.A. bungalow, so her life symbolizes the unappreciated dilemma of saintly peasants in diseased America. (A hostile neighbor kills her goat.) As an unexpected party guest for a rich client, Beatriz takes the opportunity to teach the gringos how to appreciate their spiritual essence; she preaches against their shallowness, greed, and privilege, and she fantasizes about revenge.
Todd Solondz taught a more powerful lesson in the unforgettable Lupe Ontiveros segment of Storytelling (2001), but that was before the Hillary era, in which partisans sentimentalize feminine self-pity as an excuse for political sabotage.
Arteta and White expose their own condescension by contriving Beatriz’s purity, but they also pity her to death. Beatriz at Dinner shows the secret wish of liberals who both fear and despise their social inferiors.